Nabokovilia: Sam Savage's Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife

From the opening to Sam Savage's Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife:
I had always imagined that my life story, if and when I wrote it, would have a great first line: something lyric like Nabokov's "Lolita, light of my fire, fire of my loins"; or if I could not do lyric, then something sweeping like Tolstoy's "All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." People remember those words even when they have forgotten everything else about the books.